to understand how they can vary, how a variation can arise. When two forms
of _Antirrhinum_ are crossed there is in the second generation such a
profusion of different combinations of the factors in the two
grandparents, that Lotsy has suggested that all variations may be due to
crossing. Bateson does not agree with this. He believes that genetic
factors are not permanent and indestructible, but may undergo quantitative
disintegration or fractionation, producing subtraction or reduction
stages, as in the Picotee Sweet Pea, or the Dutch Rabbit. Also variation
may take place by loss of factors as in the origin of the white Sweet Pea
from the coloured. But regarding a factor as something which, although it
may be divided, neither grows nor dwindles, neither develops nor decays,
the Mendelian cannot conceive its beginning any more than we can conceive
the creation of something out of nothing. Bateson asks us to consider
therefore whether all the divers types of life may not have been produced
by the gradual unpacking of an original complexity in the primordial,
probably unicellular forms, from which existing species and varieties have
descended. Such a suggestion in the present writer's opinion is in one
sense a truism and in another an absurdity. That the potentiality of all
the characters of all the forms that have existed, pterodactyls,
dinosaurs, butterflies, birds, etc. etc., including the characters of all
the varieties of the human race and of human individuals, must have been
present in the primordial ancestral protoplasm, is a truism, for if the
possibility of such evolution did not exist, evolution would not have
taken place. But that every distinct hereditary character of man was
actually present as a Mendelian factor in the ancestral _Amoeba_, and that
man is merely a group of the whole complex of characters allowed to
produce real effects by the removal of a host of inhibiting factors, is
incredible. The truth is that biological processes are not within our
powers of conception as those of physics and chemistry are, and Bateson's
hypothesis is nothing but the old theory of preformation in ontogeny. Just